Friday, June 17, 2011

Fundy, Fundy, Can’t Trust That Bay…

The title of this post has nothing to do with our trip, except the Fundy part. I was trying to come up with a rhyme for Fundy, and Sunday popped into my mind, and, there it was.

Anyway, we spent a few days at Fundy National Park, which is about 3/4s of the way from the mouth of the Bay to its end. The park is in a rather remote area of New Brunswick, along one of the worst roads we’ve been on. For a while we thought we were back in New Jersey.

The park is next to the tiny fishing village of Alma, and since it is a fishing (and lobstering) village, it afforded the opportunity to grab the required shots of boats at high and low tide. So here they are:

I can’t help but wonder what would happen if a boater from another part of the world docked here at high tide, and didn’t know that low tide would be 30 feet lower. The tide wasn’t all the way in when I took the high tide picture, but you get the idea.

Fundy National Park has a lot to offer beside the view of the bay. There are spectacular woodlands, lakes, streams and waterfalls.

This waterfall was on a fairly easy loop trail of about .5 kilometers. (When in Canada, measure like the Canadians.)

And speaking of Canadians, absolutely everyone we met in New Brunswick was warm and friendly. We’re in Quebec tonight, just for one night, and the people here are just as nice, although harder to understand. Since my French is limited to oui, non, and parlez vou Anglais? they probably find me hard to understand also. Actually, it’s kind of interesting to drive from one province into another in the same country, and find the traffic signs all in another language. The rest of Canada is bilingual, and all of the road signs are in English and French. But in Quebec, they are all French. Fortunately our GPS speaks to us in English.

We’re currently in a nice campground in an unpronounceable village on the St. Lawrence River, and the TV here picks up about 12 stations. Only one is in English.

I don’t know if it’s because we’ve been travelling mostly in small towns or it’s just a matter of the generally low population density in Canada, but the roads have been like driving on I-78 on a Sunday, at 3am. Traffic is extremely light, even on the major highways. Tomorrow we’ll be heading to Ottawa in English-speaking Ontario, but to get there we have to go through French-speaking Montreal, and the route seems to be complicated. Hopefully, our GPS won’t lead us astray.